Posts Tagged ‘competition’

As part of its 60th anniversary celebration and to help keep us young at heart, CERN has launched a special competition for students called: Beam line for schools.

CERN is inviting students aged 16 and upward from anywhere in the world to submit a proposal to do an experiment with a beam of particles from the Proton Synchrotron beam line. Each team can be composed of up to 30 students with at least one adult supervisor. This summer, up to nine students of the selected team will be invited to CERN to run the team’s experiment. Travelling and living expenses for the selected group will be covered by CERN.

A view of the Proton Synchrotron beam line.

The proposals will be pre-selected by a group of CERN scientists, and will then be reviewed by the same committee that validates all proposals for experiments at the laboratory’s Super Proton Synchrotron and Proton Synchrotron accelerators.

So what could you be doing? Essentially, you can investigate how beams of particles interact with matter. For example, you could study what happens when beams containing different types of particles hit targets made of various materials. The proposals will be judged on creativity, motivation, feasibility and adherence to the scientific method.

Here is your chance to come to run your own experiment at CERN. This will last about a week and take place in July, August or September. CERN physicists will be helping you to refine your idea before and during your stay at CERN.

Don’t hesitate and fill out the registration form before 31 January 2014. All you need to do at this point is send us the name of the school and of the participants as well as a tweet-of-intent stating why you think you should win this competition. You will still have until 31 March to prepare your full project, including a 1-minute video giving the highlights. Here is your chance!

Pauline Gagnon

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People often wonder how we at ATLAS feel about those bozosour good friends at CMS, and vice versa. The two experiments are trying to discovery exactly the same things, and as Monica discussed a while back, trying to keep from getting scooped by the other experiment will be nerve-wracking. Personally, I like to think of CMS as the baseball team on the other side of town. Yes, we plan to beat them at everything, every time — but deep down, we know that if they weren’t there, we couldn’t play baseball.

Obviously we don’t literally need there to be a competing detector in order to record events at the ATLAS detector or look for new physics in them, but having two detectors is actually critical to the LHC’s overall goals. At many places — especially where new things are being tried — the detectors use different technologies. For example, the T in ATLAS and S in CMS represent the very different magnet configurations used for the two detectors’ muon systems. The “worst-case” reason for this is that one detector might incorporate something that never works — and while that would be terrible for the people on that experiment, it’s a lot better to have a backup that can still do the job. But, in fact, ATLAS and CMS both work just fine so far, and we expect them to continue doing so, which brings me to the second reason that they’re complimentary: we need somebody to check our results. Of course, we at ATLAS want to (and, needless to say, will) discover everything first — but if CMS never sees the same thing, a discovery will be pretty hard to believe. The particle physics community really needs two detectors with different designs and different teams and different analysis strategies to get the same answer before we can be sure of what we’ve found. (Ideally, we’d have different accelerators too, but that’s a little out of our price range nowdays.)

I’d even say it’s a friendly rivalry, more like the San Francisco Bay Area than New York or Chicago. Although it’s hard to say — I’ve seen hats that say A’s on one side and Giants on the other, but I have yet to see any ATLAS/CMS merchandise.

Hello World! I another new US LHC blogger, drafted by my friend and ATLAS Control Room buddy, Monica Dunford. That’s me in the picture above, next to Mont Blanc, my husband Dan Spoonhower, and our friend Michael. I’m a postdoc for Columbia University, working on the ATLAS experiment, and I’ve been working at and living near CERN for over a year.

I was working in the ATLAS control room a few weeks ago the day that the LHC had its … major malfunctions. I had been hoping that we might have the first collisions that weekend. I was sitting at the same desk that Adam had been sitting at, waiting and hoping the week before. Instead of waiting for collisions after the news came in, we were waiting for more details and talking amongst ourselves. There were a bunch of people in the control room that I knew, from working on ATLAS or from previous jobs. Each person could provide a different perspective, and talking to people got me thinking about the small world of High Energy Physics. It’s true that we work with thousands of scientists on ATLAS and CMS, but we get used to seeing a lot of the same faces around.

For example, Monica was in the control room that weekend, too. I work on ATLAS with a few of the bloggers on this site: Monica, Adam and Seth. Working at the same desk with me that weekend was my friend Louise, and it happened that she knew Monica not because they both work on ATLAS, but from their previous experiment, SNO. Before coming to CERN, I had been working at Fermilab, outside of Chicago, and many people at other desks in the control room that weekend had been Fermilab folks, too.

Some familiar people to readers of this blog, Steve and Ken, were also colleagues of mine at Fermilab on the CDF experiment. I worked in the same group at the University of Michigan with Ken, while he was a postdoc and I was a graduate student. Steve worked with a different group, but he was one of the people that I remember hanging around the CDF control room all the time. He helped answer my questions when I spent my first summer there as a student. Now, I’ve become the postdoc who is hanging around the ATLAS control room all the time, trying to answer other people’s questions. Ken and Steve and I have gone from CDF collaborators to (good-natured!) ATLAS-CMS competitors.

Even people that I didn’t work much with, I still saw around — I remember going to a Chicago Cubs game a few years ago with another CMS blogger, Freya, and some mutual friends. More recently, in Geneva, when friends of mine were looking for a used sofa for their new apartment, I went with them to help move the sofa they had found online. It turned out to be Freya’s sofa! Of course. It is a small world after all…